The plight of American Indian communities, to average Americans, is usually either relegated to some distant past or outright ignored. If you're educated, maybe you'll remember reading about the Trail of Tears, or Wounded Knee (probably not Pine Ridge though).

But what about indigenous peoples today? They're largely broken, exiled to barren reservations, faced with an indifferent - or hostile - government, and casino-corrupted leaders.

This makes it all the more important that we sit up and take notice when they rise up and assert their collective rights, despite an almost total media blackout.

    It would almost seem that there was a concerted effort to create the quagmire in which we now find ourselves in Iraq, what with insufficient troops and a continued insistence on maintaining those inadequate numbers, ineffectual hit or miss raids on insurgents and a host of other blunders. Or were they blunders? George Bush seems like such a silly little dope that the tendency is to just excuse this all away as jejune   ineptitude. Lovable little tyke, just loves to play with those toy soldiers.

    In fact, there is little doubt that there has been a deliberate effort to destabilize Iraq and maintain that state of instability and it might be surprising when historical revelation, through the release of classified documents illustrates just how far back the planning of this Machiavellian masterpiece really went.

     Victory, as spun by this administration, the establishment of a stable democracy capable of defending itself from threats from within and without, would be the last thing they would want to see happen. It would spell our ticket home, which would not fit in well with the plans of a country building an "embassy" in the heart of Baghdad which is a fortress-like compound the size of Vatican City, with the population of a small town, its own defense force, shopping centers and self-contained power and water.